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September 3, 2010
Performance Measurement for Services
It goes without saying that a poor-quality service will risk a short life-span and throw its provider into the dark side of relationship management with customers.
Understandably, quality management is not outranked by any other type of service management attention. But where managers depend on measurements, the most common problem is a confusion about what measurements are "quality" measures and which might be unnecessary or better suited to a different management concern. The most frequent point of confusion is with performance management.
To distinguish the two, first it is worth noting that many measurements are important to both. But as facts within a point of view, these "shared" measurements fit differently into the two perspectives.
Quality is a percentage of a level of performance achieved both without defects and within the intended structural design of the acting entity. In comparison, performance itself is a level of operation achieved versus a target level of operation. As an example highlighting the difference and the relationship, high performance may be obtained from an acting entity, but because the quality of the entity is poor, the entity may break down or be distorted by the effort to reach and sustain the high performance. Logical management approaches aim to synchronize performance expectations with identifiable levvels of quality.
In overall operations, services underpin the performance of both products and processes, while the services themselves are also managed for their own performance. Different contexts then contribute the conditions that point those performances at quality considerations.
A business process that needs support is a "problem" for which applying a service is a "solution". In general, a service is a subscribed behavior of an operation. In this way we can see how standardized observations of the performance characteristics of the operation help to account for the success or failure of the business process.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 3, 2010 3:34 PM
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